It will undertake a daring set of orbits around the mysterious rings of Saturn to help us understand how they formed.

Cassini will end its mission with 22 daring loops passing through the gap between Saturn and its rings.
On the final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back Saturn’s secrets until the very end.

After losing contact with Earth, the spacecraft will burn up like a meteor, becoming part of the planet.

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft: The best bits

By 2017, Cassini will have spent 13 years in orbit around Saturn, following a seven-year journey from Earth.

It has expanded our understanding of the kinds of worlds where life might exist.

It’s shown us Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, Cassini, which is one of the most Earth-like worlds we’ve ever encountered, with weather, climate and geology that provide new ways to understand our home planet.

Cassini is, in a sense, a time machine, Nasa explained.

It has given us a portal to see the physical processes that likely shaped the development of our solar system, as well as planetary systems around other stars.

The length of Cassini’s mission has enabled us to observe weather and seasonal changes, improving our understanding of similar processes at Earth, and potentially those at planets around other stars.

We now know more about its moons, including their bizarre shapes.

There’s Iapetus’ with its noticeable ridge around its equator and a two-toned color pattern and Mimas which looks like the Death Star from Star Wars.

Hyperion looks like a sponge and another, called Atlas, more like a flying saucer. Cassini showed us that Prometheus is shaped like a spud and Pan resembles Italian ravioli.

The planned smash will avoid any chance that hitchhiking Earth microbes still alive on Cassini could contaminate any potential living organisms on Enceladus.

It’s a treacherous task, however.

If a ring particle hits Cassini, it could bring the mission to an premature end.
“At those speeds, even a tiny particle can do damage,” Cassini flight engineer Joan Stupik, with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters during a news conference on Nasa TV.
Scientists hope to learn if the rings are as old as Saturn itself – roughly 4.6 billion years of age – or if they formed later after a passing comet or moon was shredded by the planet’s tremendous gravity.

During the close ring encounters, Cassini also will study Saturn’s atmosphere and take measurements to determine the size of the rocky core believed to exist at the center of the gigantic ball of gas that accounts for most of its size.
However long Cassini lasts, “the grand finale will be spectacular,” said project scientist Linda Spilker, also with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We’re flying in a region that has never been explored before,” she said. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some of the discoveries we make with Cassini during the grand finale are the best of the mission.”

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